Antonio Berni
– Artist’s Website –
Nuevo Realismo
In 1931 Berni returned to Rosario, where he briefly lived on a farm, and was then hired as a municipal employee. The Argentina of the 1930s was very different from the Paris of the 1920s. He witnessed labor demonstrations and the miserable effects of unemployment,[5] and was shocked by the news of a military coup d’état in Buenos Aires (see Infamous Decade). Surrealism didn’t convey the frustration or hopelessness of the Argentine people. Berni organized Mutualidad de Estudiantes y Artistas, and became a member of the local Communist party.[2]
Berni met Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, who had been painting large-scale political murals on public buildings, and was visiting Argentina to give lectures and exhibit his work in an effort to “summon artists to participate in the development of a proletarian art.” In 1933 Berni, Siqueiros, Spilimbergo, Juan Carlos Castagnino, and Enrique Lázaro created the mural Ejercicio Plástico (Plastic Exercise).[4] But ultimately Berni didn’t think the murals could inspire social change, and even implied a connection between Siqueiro’s artwork and the privileged classes of Argentina, saying, “Mural painting is only one of the many forms of popular artistic expression…for his mural painting, Siqueros was obliged to seize on the first board offered to him by the bourgeoisie.”[7]
Instead he began painting realistic images that depicted the struggles and tensions of the Argentine people. His popular Nuevo Realismo paintings include Desocupados (The Unemployed) and Manifestación (Manifestation).[5] Both were based on photographs Berni had gathered to document, as graphically as possible, the “abysmal conditions of his subjects.”[8] As one critic noted, “the quality of his work resides in the precise balance that he attained between narrative painting with strong social content and aesthetic originality.”[4]
In a 1936 interview, Berni said that the decline of art was indicative of the division between the artist and the public, and that social realism stimulated a mirror of the surrounding spiritual, social, political, and economic realities.[4][5]
1940s and 1950s
In 1941, at the request of the Comisión Nacional de Cultura, Berni traveled to Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia to study pre-Columbian art. His painting Mercado indígena (Indian Market) is based on the photos he took during this trip.[2]
Two years later he was awarded an Honorary Grand Prix at the Salón Nacional, and co-founded a mural workshop with fellow artists Spilimbergo, Juan Carlos Castagnino, Demetrio Urruchúa, and Manuel Colmeiro. The artists decorated the dome of the Galerías Pacifico.[1]
The 1940s saw various revolutions and coups d’état in Latin America, including the ousting of Argentine President Ramón Castillo in 1943. Berni responded with more political paintings, including Masacre (Massacre) and El Obrero Muerto (The Dead Worker).[2]
From 1951 to 1953 Berni lived in Santiago del Estero, a province in northwestern Argentina. The province was suffering massive ecological damage, including the exploitation of quebracho trees. While in Santiago del Estero he painted the series Motivos santiagueños and Chaco, the latter of which was exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Bucharest and Moscow.[2]
In the 1950s, he returned to expressionism with works like Los hacheros (Axemen) and La comida (Food),[3] and began a series of suburban landscapes including Villa Piolín (Villa Tweety), La casa del sastre (House of Taylor), La iglesia (The Church), El tanque blanco (White Tank), La calle (Street), La res (The Answer), Carnicería (Carnage), La luna y su eco (The Moon and its Echo), and Mañana helada en el páramo desierto (Morning Frost on the Moor). He also painted Negro y blanco (Black and White), Utensilios de cocina sobre un muro celeste (Cookware on a Blue Wall), and El caballito (The Pony).[2]